Below her is a quickly dwindling vision of bulldozers and cranes on the construction site at Yonge and Gerrard Streets in downtown Toronto.

Getting off the lift, Jamaican-born Robinson, in a hard hat and steel-toed boots, steps onto bare concrete and sprints up eight flights of stairs. On the 38th floor she hikes over a girder and then quickly climbs up a steel ladder.

Her destination is the unfinished roof of the 39th floor, the halfway point of what will eventually be the tallest residential tower in Canada.

The view, even halfway there, is stunning.

“It’s pretty nice, isn’t it?” says Robinson.

If there is a pressure test in the construction industry, this is it.

Robinson, who is in her early 40s, is the project manager for Aura at College Park, 1.2 million square feet of residential and retail space and as big as any bank tower. The views are audacious, but so is the pricing, with the penthouse going for $17.5 million.

The blunt-talking Robinson is a rarity in the construction world: a woman. And you could likely count on one hand the number of female project managers in the industry.

This week has been particularly busy, with key retail tenants taking possession of their properties.

A few days earlier, the U.S. discount chain Marshalls got its keys. And in a few months it will be Bed Bath and Beyond’s first urban Canadian location, a mammoth, 50,000-square-foot space that Robinson is racing to finish on time.

Robinson came to Toronto in 2001 from the island’s capital, Kingston.

She is married to another Jamaican, who works in the fitness industry, and they have two girls, aged 5 and 10.

Of Irish, Scottish and African roots, Robinson calls herself a “complete mix-up, like most Jamaicans.”

When they hear her Jamaican accent, people will ask if she is Swedish or from some other Scandinavian country. Or maybe from South Africa.

“It’s weird,” she says. “They just can’t figure out white people could be born in Jamaica.”

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